Deep-Sea Scientific Drilling Hit By a Cost Double Whammy
Filed under: Discovery,News & Resources,Scientific Ocean Drilling,Ship Conversion
*** Editorial Note from Ocean Leadership ***
This article gives an incorrect date for the JOIDES Resolution leaving the shipyard. The ship will leave the yard in late January 2009.
Science
October 24, 2008
By Richard A. Kerr
As the oil industry gears up for the ongoing offshore-oil boom, scientists who study the sea floor say competition for scarce drilling resources is leaving them high and dry. "Funding goes down, oil goes up," laments paleoceanographer Henk Brinkhuis of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Facing soaring costs and lengthening delays, the United States component of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)--the current phase of the cooperative international investigation beneath the sea floor--has been literally stuck in dry dock, leading to an unprecedented 3-year hiatus in U.S. drilling. Japanese and European components of IODP are not faring much better. "I am very concerned about the long-term future of IODP," says marine geologist Craig Fulthorpe of the University of Texas, Austin.
Perhaps the worst blow came when the United States set out several years ago to refurbish and modernize its drilling platform, the JOIDES Resolution, or more familiarly, the JR. The $130 million renovation job had a fixed cost in a Singapore shipyard, but as the rising cost of oil spurred a surge of offshore drilling, the yard shunted the scientific ship to the side to focus on building and refurbishing drilling platforms for well-heeled oil companies.
Under the resulting schedule pressure, the JR--originally programmed to resume drilling in October 2007--will be leaving the yard in early March 2009. This delay pushed two 8-week drilling cruises led by Fulthorpe and by Brinkhuis back a full year on less than 2 months' notice. "It is a disruption," says Fulthorpe. Meanwhile, the competition with the oil industry hit the Europeans even harder. They had signed a short-term contract for onetime use of a special-purpose drill ship, but the owner of the vessel broke the contract to lease it to a higher paying oil company, Brinkhuis says. The European component of IODP has not drilled in 2 years.
With work on the JR nearing completion, researchers now fear that budget cuts may curtail scientific drilling for years to come. U.S. operations are being funded well below expectations of a few years ago, says James Allan of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds the U.S. component of IODP. NSF funding amounts to almost a 20% cut in inflation-adjusted dollars, he says. Scientists also face three- to fourfold increases in the cost of drilling consumables such as steel liners for drill holes and a recently estimated $1-million-per-month rise in the cost of fueling the JR.
As a result of the soaring costs, NSF now plans for the JR to devote only 70% of its time to IODP drilling. The Japanese behemoth ship Chikyu is likewise drilling for IODP only 60% to 70% of the time. Yet, there's plenty of science to be done. "There are now 30 drilling proposals [in the pipeline] that have been highly ranked," says Brinkhuis. With the reschedulings plus the cutbacks in operating time, much of that science will be delayed and some never tackled at all, scientists worry.
The JR's non-IODP time, everyone hopes, will be leased to a consortium of oil companies to drill holes of interest to both industry and scientists. But falling back on industry "is very discouraging for scientists," says longtime ocean-drilling participant Theodore Moore Jr. of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Industry and academia attempted a marriage of convenience 25 years ago (Science, 8 February 1980, p. 627) to no avail. "It's always been a difficult task linking industry and scientists' interests," says Moore. Still, unless ship-fuel costs continue to ease, there is no other relief on the horizon.
